


To Bee or Not to Bee

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bees, Crack, Gen, Non-human POV, bee-facts-that-maybe-made-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-04
Updated: 2013-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-25 14:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/954424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean hunt killer bees. And bones. Bees AND bones.<br/>Oh, and there is some anaphylactic shock, dream-sheep, and imaginary elephants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Bee or Not to Bee

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [И загудел пчелиный рой](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5736064) by [Wincent_Cester](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wincent_Cester/pseuds/Wincent_Cester)



> for the Triple Play Challenge at ohsam for the prompt 1) Apiary 2)Dean 3)Anaphylactic shock and the need to get the f away from BEES.  
> Art by Sheri Sam.

_ _

_The witch’s bones turn beneath the ground._

_They murmur in the way bones do, in the tongue of dust and ashes, and sigh at the memory of flesh and sinew. These fading yellow metacarpals once seeped rage through sieves, threaded love and despair, concocted death and beauty. They were strong once, gnarled later, and now they are mostly dust._

_And so the witch’s bones turn beneath the ground, murmuring._

_From their deep tongues birth a magic seed, and from that seed a plant. The plant twists through hard earth and waterless soil to greet the sun, and from the plant grows a flower. It’s not a very pretty flower, nor does it smell particularly enticing._

_No bee in its right mind would ever have visited the Flower, but above the witch’s bones is an apiary, and there are many many hives. The bees are there to pollinate and competition is stiff, so one day a stupid bee comes to the Flower._

_The witch’s bones laugh as the stinger grows and the bee drips with the venom of the evil bones. It’s a snowball reaction, growth by positive feedback: the infected bee infects other bees, and soon, the Flower calls out to all of them._

_They madly try to escape their hives to satiate their lust for the Flower, and the Flower always satisfies._

_They bite their keepers to get to the Flower, and the keepers promptly collapse._

_The witch’s bones turn beneath the ground._

_They laugh and laugh._

_~~~_

“ _Bees_ killed them,” Dean says, incredulously. “ _Bees.”_

Sam’s starting to wonder if Dean just likes saying ‘bees’, because he’s been repeating the statement at regular intervals for the past hour or so, as if waiting for Sam to blow a trumpet and announce that _no, he’s just kidding, there are no killer bees, all the bees we know are happy-fuzzy._

“Bees regularly kill people, Dean. The figure is around fifty-four per year in the US alone,” Sam picks up a protective outfit and peers through the plasticine mask. “ _Our_ problem is that twelve people have been fatally stung in this apiary alone, _and_ it’s been abandoned for nearly four years. Long enough for the bees to get the message and pack up shop.”

Dean raps cautiously on the gazebo door leading into the apiary, shrugging when it opens easily to let him in. “And the last guy, Wilson Whatever-it-Is, croaked... yesterday? Yeah, I see your point. Still don’t see why you think it’s supernatural.”

Sam shrugs as he follows Dean into the apiary, pulling the silly plastic veil above his head. “Being allergic is one thing, man. But _twelve_ people, all of them fatally allergic? And you saw that Wilson dude at the morgue. He went into anaphylactic shock and had a heart attack—”

“And he was purple—”

“—yes, from his airways getting swollen. He choked. All this in a matter of seconds, according to the coroner’s report,” Sam says, quietly, “But the real kicker is that I checked out the history of the apiary, and turns out, the plot belongs to an old family, the Graysons. One of them is buried here. Cotton Mather hung the old woman in 1693 for alleged witchcraft.”

Dean whistles. “So—cursed witchy bones, salt ‘em and burn ‘em?”

“That should do it. They can’t be more than dust now,” Sam nods, pulling the EMF meter out. The inside of the apiary is green and quiet, overgrown weeds choking empty pallet hives. Dean walks ahead, his EMF meter buzzing, pulling out the hive drawers to stare curiously at empty insides that still smell faintly of honey. His protective outfit flaps behind him comically, and Sam tamps down on the wisecrack that threatens to spill out of his mouth.

Dean snorts. “Dude, really. We’re dealing with _haunted_ bees. That’s a first.”

Sam suddenly has a mental reel of Dean running from fuzzy, happy bumblebees and shakes his head to dislodge it. He grins and then moves towards the rear rows, noting that the EMF meter seems to be perking up here. “Dean,” he calls, and then his foot clashes against a rusted teapot hidden beneath the overgrown grass. Sam startles at the noise, looking up, and then it’s like everything goes slow motion.

He sees the teapot roll into a thick growth of garish purple flowers, landing amidst them with a hollow thunk. He also sees the buzzing cloud that rises from the flowers, black and yellow and murderous. For a minute, Sam thinks he sees himself in one of those awful kaleidoscopic compound eyes. _Target. Spotted._

 _A female honeybee,_ Sam thinks hysterically, _dies naturally upon stinging its victim._

“Oh, no.”

The EMF meter falls from his hands as he runs for it, yelling at Dean to do the same, but the bees are too fast, and he feels one sting his upper arm. Gasping at the sudden sharp pain, Sam follows Dean out of the gazebo, the cloud of bees darting cinematically between pallets and gaining on them.

“Shut the door!” Dean cries, and Sam complies, getting stung again in the process, gritting his teeth.

 _The queen bumblebee,_ he thinks again, _produces a pheromone that controls the egg-laying ability of her worker bees._

He staggers a few steps backward and gasps as his vision starts to swim a bit. 

“Get the smoker, Dean!” he wheezes, and then a wave of light-headedness wallops him, the sky tilts and the ground comes up too fast. Blinking, Sam notices a blurry giant opening its mouth and spewing curls of smoke that smells of hessian and pine-needles, but any further thought process on what the blurry giant could mean in the greater sense is lost amidst a spasm of coughing. His skin burns and there is something in his throat, obstructing his attempts to breathe.

Probably his tongue.

 _Sam-m-meeee,_ he hears, and the word is long-tailed and multicoloured, spinning through the air. He has to leap to catch it, but his head is spinning. A sharp, tugging pain starts in his chest and spreads down his arm, and Sam thinks, blearily, _the average person can safely tolerate 10 stings per pound of body weight!_ He thinks it with the exclamation mark included.

 _Average person._ Average bee. Not a bee with supernatural mojo.

 _SAM SAM SAM._ Now like a siren.

He wheezes and coughs, vision tunnelling to a point, then blinking out completely. _Bloop._ He smells more strange smoke and hears the gazebo door open again, and then there are all these sheep walking around in his head, so he figures it’s okay to sleep.

~~~

_The man with the smoker has vicious green eyes and the bees scatter from him, confused at the noxious fumes surrounding him._

_The convulsing boy dropped a beeping thing-ma-jig near the witch’s bones and there it lies, still beeping. The beeping guides the green-eyed man to the flowers, and he tramples them with his foot._

_A bee sitting atop the nearest hive tries to make a beeline for him, but the smoke makes it happy-fuzzy so it just sits there and watches the man curse and sweat and worry as he turns the dirt with his shovel, scraping and scraping it away till he finds a bundle, because the Graysons never put the witch in a coffin. The witch’s bones crumble to dust when he pulls it out, but he lights it on fire just the same, dropping it back into the hole and upending an entire jar of salt over it before he runs back outside._

_The bee watches sleepily. It already misses the Flowers._

_~~~_

“Sammy?”

Sam’s run out of sheep and stupid facts, so he figures he’ll wake up now.

“Huh? Wha-?”

Ceiling. Whiteness. Disinfectant.

 _Ah,_ he thinks, _hospital_. His head is still whirling, but now it has a dopey drugged-ness to it, so he figures: _medicine._

“Dude, you were, like, _purple,”_ Dean says, swimming slowly into Sam’s vision. “You nearly gave me a coronary. You nearly _had_ a coronary.”

“Bones?” wheezes Sam.

“Gone.”

“Oh,” says Sam, who’s thinking about how many bees it’ll take to kill an elephant. Probably just one if it were a very small elephant. It’d have to be the size of his palm. Or the size of Dean’s palm, which is hovering somewhere over his eyes. A mimmoth-elephant. Sam wonders if he should ask Dean about that. The elephant and the bee. It could have been a Dr. Seuss book.

His chest hurts and he thinks: _bee stings causes spasms of the bronchial muscles._ But then, Sam reckons, the bees have it so much worse. _The bee leaves its stinger and venom pouch behind when it stings and soon dies from abdominal rupture._

What a way to go.

Dean’s hand settles on his hair and the weight of it is comforting.

“I smoked them bees, man,” Dean says, proudly. “I was badass.”

                                                          


End file.
